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The bourgeois Left not only has different cultural tastes than the working classes; it disapproves of blue-collar tastes as well: “It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.”

We see such disdain for blue-collar taste in our own modern American culture. Indeed, to many on the left, Donald Trump symbolizes bad taste. Snobbishness about food, country music, clothing, NASCAR, or “guns and religion” is as casual as it is accepted in the better ZIP codes of New York and Los Angeles. Orwell, to say the least, had the Left’s number, in ways we still recognize today: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

The Crust remains the Crust even when it is championing the Underclass.

Following Donald Trump’s stunning win in the election, a plague of hate crime hoaxes has been sweeping the country.

From California to Illinois to Louisiana, stories are cropping up of hate crimes perpetrated by Trump supporters that later prove to be fabricated by the so-called “victim” of the crime. Here is a roundup of the “hate crimes” identified as hoaxes so far, although there are other unsubstantiated stories that perhaps have not been identified as hoaxes because the perpetrator is more competent. (RELATED: Here’s A List Of Completely Substantiated Attacks On Trump Supporters)

We read constantly in the press about about efforts by the Establishment to hunt down and exterminate the last redoubts of male dominance. For example, the New York Times is currently worked up over astronomy departments being too male. As we all know, he who controls the astronomy department controls the world!

But in reality, the Big Three of powerful professional schools — law schools, medical schools, and business schools — opened up to women students a long time ago, with near sex equality occurring in enrollments with relatively little resistance over the course of the 1970s.

The “America’s Got Talented” host tore into Planned Parenthood and its stance on abortion in an interview last week with “The Breakfast Club.” He said Planned Parenthood is inflicting “real genocide” on the African American community.

“Hillary [Clinton] was sneaking and cheating,” Cannon said in the radio interview. “Think about all the stuff they did with Planned Parenthood and all that type of stuff. That type of stuff is to take our community — and forget gentrification, it’s real genocide, and it’s been like that for years.”

“Chairman Price, a renowned physician, has earned a reputation for being a tireless problem solver and the go-to expert on health care policy, making him the ideal choice to serve in this capacity,” Trump said in a statement. “He is exceptionally qualified to shepherd our commitment to repeal and replace Obamacare and bring affordable and accessible health care to every American.”

Well, he’s a doctor, so that’s good. And he apparently hates Obamacare, so that’s even better.

Artan, who referenced al-Qaida cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki in a pre-stabbing rant posted to Facebook, launched his attack in spite of university events like “Islam 101” and “Islamophobia in America” meant to decrease the Islamophobia that some leftists in the media and academia have said is the root cause of Islamic terrorism.

Gee, it works so well with Christians and Jews.

He must have gotten ‘radicalized’ in his sleep or something when nobody was looking.

It seemed so simple: An active shooter on a college campus. Even more proof that America needs even more gun control. Validation. Relief. Take that, teabaggers!

Then it got all so complicated and stressful. As it turned out, the Ohio State “shooter” didn’t have a gun. The only gun involved in the whole incident was used by the police officer who stopped the man with a knife who had just stabbed 11 people. And, complicating the narrative even further, the knife-wielding attacker was a Somali refugee named Abdul Razak Ali Artan.

This was not how things were supposed to go.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

So, it’s obvious what happened here. This peaceful young Muslim was scared by all those white Christian Americans who kept looking at him funny, because they were brainwashed by the media’s lies about his coreligionists. Those infidels gave him no choice but to try to run them over and stab them to death. This is their fault.

This is your fault.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

I’m reminded of Muzzammil Hassan, the Buffalo, NY entrepreneur who founded Bridges TV, the first Muslim-American TV network. His goal was to counter negative stereotypes about Muslims after 9/11. A few years later, he ended up complicating that effort a bit by beheading his wife.

Why do you keep forcing these proud, innocent Muslims to do these things, America? Why can’t you just leave them alone?

“It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough,” said Sanders. “What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies.”

In response, Quentin James—former head of Ready for Hillary’s outreach efforts to people of color—had this to say, “I like U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders but his comments regarding identity politics suggest he may be a white supremacist, too.”

Sanders. A white supremacist. For daring to suggest that the most obvious sort of race-and-gender tribalism was not a winning strategy for the left.

The future of American cities can be summed up in five letters: Texas. The metropolitan areas of the Lone Star state are developing rapidly. These cities are offering residents a broad array of choices — from high density communities to those where the population is spread out — and a wealth of opportunities.

As compared to places like Michigan, where cities are drying up and blowing away under the combined efforts of Democrat kleptocrats and NAM welfare culture. The only thing growing in Michigan is the number of foreign Muslims making the Detroit suburbs a Little Mesopotamia.

A gang of culture-enrichers set upon a dog-walker in the German town of Schwerin, beating and stabbing him. In the following report their motive is not entirely clear, but it seems the issue may have been the dog.

Six government appointees, including the son of a vice president, who negotiated how much public money would be spent building the Minnesota Vikings’ new football stadium get free access to luxury boxes for all events in the stadium.

Which, you know, might call into question how hard they really negotiated for the taxpayers on that one.

Bet they were Democrats.

Maybe the best part of the story is the moment when two members of the MSFA board (chairwoman Michele Kelm-Helgen and executive director Ted Mondale) try to justify their sweet, free, and secret perk by arguing that they “work long hours on game days and spent long nights negotiating on behalf of taxpayers during construction of the building, so having friends and family there is reasonable.”

Mondale, by the way, is the son of former U.S. vice president Walter Mondale and he has lived the life of a vice president’s son. After a brief stint in elected office during the 1990s, he’s settled into a rotating set of political appointments. He was appointed to the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council by Gov. Jesse Ventura in 1999, and he used that post to push for the approval of a pair of ridiculously expensive light rail lines. With that public boondoggle in his resume, he was probably a natural fit on the MSFA board, to which he was named CEO by Gov. Mark Dayton in 2012, just as the new stadium deal was in the works.

Looks perfectly Crustian to me. What’s the use of having power if you can’t abuse it?

When Stein first announced her recount efforts, her goal was to reach $2.5 million. Now it’s $7 million. Stein has raised $5 million since Wednesday, causing the goal to rise from $2.5 million to $4.5 million to $7 million, according to National Public Radio. What caused the sudden rise in Stein’s fundraising goal?

American progressives have a long and genuine commitment to mass democracy, having supported not only various expansions of the franchise but also many instruments of direct democracy such as the ballot initiative, but they also have a long and genuine commitment to frustrating democracy when it gets in the way of the progressive agenda, which is why they have spent the better part of a century working to politicize the courts, the bureaucracies, and the non-governmental institutions they control in order to ensure they get their way even when they lose at the ballot box. Democrats did not pay much attention when they started suffering losses at the state level, because they were working against federalism and toward a unitary national government controlled from Washington. And they did not fight as hard as they might to recover from their losses in Congress while Barack Obama sat in the White House, obstructing Republican legislative initiatives and attempting to govern through executive fiat — an innovation that the Democrats surely are about to regret in the direst way.

I didn’t realize how many Americans actually hate their own country until I talked about Fidel Castro at Harvard Law School. I had no idea how many Americans despise democracy and have no problem with tyranny – so long as they’re in charge – until I talked about Castro in Manhattan. And I had no clue how many Americans believed that sins committed in the name of socialism weren’t sins at all until I talked about Castro in Ithaca, New York.

One of the best TV chefs ever just retired, and you probably never watched him.

Not that Jacques Pépin—classically trained French chef, intimate of the late Julia Child, and former New York Times food columnist—is obscure, exactly. He served as the personal chef to three French presidents, including Charles de Gaulle, and worked at the renowned New York City restaurant Le Pavillon in the 1950s and ’60s. His encyclopedic 1976 guide to French cooking, La Technique, is legendary among professional chefs. But because his many cooking shows were tucked away on public television, he never became a household name on the level of Emeril Lagasse or Rachael Ray. (Pépin, who turned 80 last year, has said that his 13th PBS series, Heart & Soul, which concluded in March, will be his last.) That’s a shame, because his shows are an antidote to much of what ails modern food TV and, by extension, American cooking culture.

The new annotated translation of Justinian’s Code is going to be a useful reference. I am also looking forward to reading The History of William Marshal, The Complete Literary Works of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Harima Fudoki.

Can you remember the last time you did calculus? Unless you are a researcher or engineer, chances are good it was in a high-school or college class you’d rather forget. For most Americans, solving a calculus problem is not a skill they need to perform well at work.

This is not to say that America’s workforce doesn’t need advanced mathematics—quite the opposite. An extensive 2011 McKinsey Global Institute study found that by 2018 the U.S will face a 1.5 million worker shortfall in analysts and managers who have the mathematical training necessary to deal with analysis of “large data sets,” the bread and butter of the big-data revolution.

The question is not whether advanced mathematics is needed but rather what kind of advanced mathematics. Calculus is the handmaiden of physics; it was invented by Newton to explain planetary and projectile motion. While its place at the core of math education may have made sense for Cold War adversaries engaged in a missile and space race, Minute-Man and Apollo no longer occupy the same prominent role in national security and continued prosperity that they once did.

How do you measure happiness? The Antiplanner isn’t sure, but recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all. The effect isn’t as pronounced for especially intelligent people, the researchers concluded, but it was still there.

Some of it might be that cities are full of Democrats and suburbs of Republicans. Most Democrats don’t have time to be happy, since their lives are full of the desperate search for oppression.

I’ll be the first to admit I was surprised by Trump’s win, but the denial of the First Female President® into the White House will be the cause du jour for every jilted woman who believes she’s a “professional”. Even if Clinton had won the mainstream would’ve been inundated with how ‘we still have a long way to go’ stories, however, with Trump in the Presidency the same tired narrative of systemic male sexism will get reinvigorated in the coming years.

Television actor Ron Glass, who was best known for his roles as Shepherd Book on Firefly and as Detective Ron Harris on Barney Miller has passed away yesterday, according to TV Line. He was 71 years old.

Poking fun at Trudeau’s weak response, Twitter users imagined how he might respond to the passing of other dictators and mass murders (both real and fictitious), using the hashtag #TrudeauEulogies to collectively laugh at the prime minister.

The next radical environmental tactic is now evident for eyes to see: block all infrastructure projects—especially oil and gas pipelines—with criminal trespass and obstruction. Having killed the Keystone pipeline (only temporarily, now that Trump is going to approve it once he takes office), the red-greenies are trying to stop the Dakota Access pipeline that has received all of its regulatory permits.

Naturally environmentalists have to lie about the whole matter, whipping up claims that sacred native American grounds are being harmed by the pipeline, or that groundwater is at risk. (The first claim reminds me of a joke I heard in Australia 30 years ago: how do know when you’ve found sacred Aboriginal grounds? When you find uranium or other valuable minerals underneath.) Naturally the usual Hollywood idiots show up to join the war whoop.